The Bible makes a comeback in public schools.

PERIODICALLY AN ORGANIZATION comes along promising to defuse the long-running battle over religion in public education by increasing instruction about religion as an academic discipline. At first glance, such proposals have great appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that objective study about religion is unconstitutional. In fact, in its landmark 1963 Bible-reading decision, Abington Township School District v. Schempp, the court majority lauded such instruction, writing: "It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization."

Fair enough. But the effort to introduce religion into U.S. schools in an objective manner isn't as simple as it first sounds, as recent events have proven.

Currently, two organizations are roaming the country, proposing that school boards adopt their "Bible-as-history" and "Bible-as-literature" curriculums. One of these organizations--the North Carolina-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools--was in the news recently after the school board in Odessa, Texas, adopted its curriculum amid much controversy. The second group--the Bible Literacy Project--made headlines when it rolled out a glossy textbook entitled The Bible and Its Influence.

The National Council's curriculum is, to be blunt, a constitutional train wreck. The group is tied to a number of televangelists and relies on religious right revisionist historian David Barton, who peddles claptrap arguing that the United States was intended to be a "Christian nation:' The National Council's curriculum might be fine for a conservative church's Sunday school but it has no place in a public school. (Indeed, litigation is already being threatened in Odessa.)

The backers of the Bible Literacy Project seem to be aware that the National Council's materials are problematic. In fact, the Project's major selling point is that its book is balanced and supposedly more objective than what the National Council puts out. However, while the Bible Literacy Project's book may be preferable to what the National Council offers, this doesn't mean it is without its own flaws. In fact, the book has several.

For starters, the tome is saturated with the assumption that the Bible's influence has, more or less, been overwhelmingly positive. This sugarcoating is a major and rarely discussed pitfall of the "teach about religion" movement. In an overwhelmingly religious society, it is fair to ask if it's even possible to teach a "warts-and-all" approach to the dominant faith.

Yet we know plenty of warts exist. The Bible was used to rationalize slavery in the South. It was--and continues to be--used to justify the oppression of women. The Bible and Its Influence simply glosses over these inconvenient facts. It also contains no mention of the Salem witch trials and other less-than-appealing religious fallout.

In analyzing the book and its backers, my colleague Joseph Conn at Americans United for Separation of Church and State uncovered some disturbing facts. Many of the project's supporters are religious conservatives. Chuck Stetson, chairperson of the Bible Literacy Project, is a longtime backer of Republican candidates and advocate of fundamentalist forms of Christianity. Stetson is a close ally of Charles Colson, the former Watergate figure who turned evangelical activist. In fact, Stetson took special training from a Colson-run program to learn how to "restore our culture by effectively thinking, teaching, and advocating a biblical worldview as applied to all of life" Stetson apparently has no credentials as either a historian or biblical scholar, yet his name appears on the cover as coauthor of the book.

Conn notes that The Bible and Its Influence offers a wholly inadequate treatment of the development of religious freedom in the United States. The book implies that the First Amendment was intended only to prevent the establishment of a national church; yet the history of the drafting of the amendment and its own wording indicate a much broader sweep. The book contains no mention of Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall of separation between church and state" metaphor but discourses on the Northwest Ordinance, an obscure document frequently touted by the religious right because it states that religion is necessary for good government. Furthermore, the Supreme Court's major rulings on church and state from the modern era are ignored completely.

Conn also uncovered one serious factual error in the book: a passage on religion in America frequently attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville that was in fact never uttered by him. Such sloppiness is inexcusable. (Conn's complete analysis appears in the January 2006 issue of AU's Church & State.)

The Bible and Its Influence was assembled by a committee. Thus it dodges compelling questions that anyone who seeks to understand the Bible must eventually confront. For example, few Bible scholars believe the gospels were written by the men whose names they bear or that they are contemporary accounts of the life of Christ. The most familiar Bible stories--such as the birth of Jesus--are a mishmash of the four accounts with the contradictions stripped away to fashion a coherent narrative.

Similarly, archaeology has failed to find support for many familiar Old Testament narratives that fundamentalists stubbornly insist are literal history. We do our students no favors by pretending the fundamentalists have a point when precious little evidence backs their claims. The Bible and Its Influence doesn't address these issues. If it did, no public school in the United States would adopt the book. This leaves students in an odd position. They are offered a type of "historical creationism"--an assertion that competing claims about the Bible's historical claims are equally valid and students may simply choose whichever one they like.

To its credit, The Bible and Its Influence is an attractive text chockfull of lovely images. It contains some valuable information and it likely to appeal to a generation raised on MTV. It is certainly better than the outright misinformation peddled by the televangelists at the National Council. But the fact that the text is superior to a fundamentalist Sunday School curriculum is hardly high praise. America's public school children deserve better.

In an atmosphere marked by sectarian division and a growing fundamentalist insurgency that has attached itself to the majority political party, concern that efforts to teach "about" religion in an even-handed manner might be hijacked by aggressive fundamentalists isn't mere paranoia; it's a call for vigilance and prudence.

Objective instruction about religion, after all, is not what fundamentalists want. They want their understanding of the Bible taught as fact. The Bible and Its Influence doesn't go quite that far. What it does is grease the skids for biblical literalists by glossing over the real differences Americans perceive about what the Bible is, what it says, and what, if anything, its words mean for our daily lives.

Rob Boston is assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State,